Kołakowski from Spiritualized Marxism to Disappointed Utopianism
Part of a Series on the Philosophy of History
Wednesday 23 October 2024 is the 97th anniversary of the birth of Leszek Kołakowski (23 October 1927–17 July 2009), who was born in Radom, Poland, on this day in 1927.
Kołakowski was a student of Tadeusz Kotarbinski who was in turn a student of Kazimierz Twardowski. The Polish philosophical tradition is one of the most impressive in Europe, including figures such as Stanisław Leśniewski and Kazimierz Twardowski. It’s one of the most remarkable features of Polish intellectual life in the second half of the twentieth century that, despite the country being under the control of a communist regime during the Cold War, the philosophical tradition was virtually free of the kind of ideological capture that characterized the Soviet Union and most of its dependent states. In the work of Kotarbinski, Jan Łukasiewicz, Kazimierz Ajdukiewicz, and others who came to be collectively called the Lvov-Warsaw School, we see the purest philosophical spirit in evidence, uncontaminated by any political agenda. Although Kołakowski appeared within this milieu, he was not among the philosophers who focused on logic and metaphysics, like the Lvov-Warsaw School, though I suspect the elevated philosophical climate in which he was working made his own independence of mind possible.
Kolakowski himself was a Marxist who wrote extensively on the Marxist tradition in philosophy — we could say that he was an internal critic of Marxism — and it was this what eventually got him in trouble with the authorities. He might be considered more a philosopher engaged with contemporary events rather than a philosopher of history in the strict sense, but contemporary events are history too, which I emphasized in my episode on Karl Jaspers, and a philosophical engagement with contemporary history has much to teach us about philosophy of history.
Kołakowski covered a wide range of topics. For example, he wrote a book on positivism, The Alienation of Reason, and a book on phenomenology, Husserl and the Search for Certitude, and he found similar thematic motives in these apparently very different philosophical movements. For Kołakowski, both logical positivism and phenomenology represented the pursuit of an epistemological absolute. The pursuit of an absolute — any absolute — adds a teleological dimension to history, and as such the work of Husserl and the logical positivists, insofar as it seeks an epistemological absolute, isn’t merely an epistemological ideal, though it’s that, too. It’s more than an epistemological ideal. Since the goal of this teleology is an absolute, we could say that this is an eschatological quest — the most recent permutation of the perennial human quest to grasp something greater than ourselves.
At the end of his book on Husserl he characterized Husserl’s pursuit of an epistemological absolute in this way:
“…the search for certitude is unlikely to be given up, and we may doubt if it would be desirable to stop it. This search has little to do with the progress of science and technology. Its background is religious rather than intellectual; it is, as Husserl perfectly knew, a search for meaning… I should end by saying that my intention was not to suggest that Husserl’s quest for the new transcendental rationality and of the source of perfect certainty was worthless. I think that his attempt failed to reach its goal as indeed, I suspect, all attempts to get at the epistemological absolute are bound to fail.” (Husserl and the Search for Certitude, p. 84)
And of the logical empiricists he had this to say:
“From the point of view of applied knowledge, the desire for an epistemological absolute, i.e., ‘metaphysical certainty,’ is fruitless, and those in quest of this certainty were perfectly aware of the fact. And yet, we repeat, philosophy has never given up its attempt to constitute an autonomous ‘Reason,’ independent of technological applications and irreducible to purely recording functions.” (The Alienation of Reason, pp. 209–210)
Kołakowski also introduced larger themes in his book on positivism. The penultimate chapter is titled, “Logical Empiricism: A Scientistic Defense of Threatened Civilization.” Despite the interesting ideas implicit in this chapter title, Kolakowski doesn’t explain or develop these ideas, though I could say that since this is the title of his chapter, the ideas are implicit throughout. So he doesn’t explain exactly what he means by “scientism,” although we understand readily enough that this is supposed to be an ideology derived from science but not identical with science. Twice earlier in the book, before discussing logical empiricism, Kolakowski gives a brief account of what he understands by “scientism,” although the accounts don’t exactly tally.
“…scientism, that is, the doctrine according to which any question that cannot he settled by the methods of the natural and deductive sciences is an improper question, and every statement containing an answer to an improper question is itself improper or, more precisely, meaningless.”
And later,
“…scientism… asserts the essential unity of the scientific method, accounting for differences between the sciences on this score — especially between the social and the physical sciences — by the immaturity of the former, though it is believed they will eventually be modeled on the latter.”
To scientism he’s attributing the denial of the meaningfulness of any non-scientific question as well as the unity of scientific method. These two ways of thinking about scientism aren’t mutually exclusive, and I could argue that these two ideas are mutually reinforcing — that there is one and only one scientific method, and anything beyond the reach of that method lies outside the scope of legitimate rational inquiry, are positions that support each other. My point in bringing this up is that we don’t get an unambiguous account of scientism in the book on positivism that culminates in equating logical empiricism with scientism.
And Kolakowski doesn’t tell us what the threatened civilization is in his chapter title, or why it’s threatened, but we can gather from the twentieth century context in which he wrote, with its pervasive change, and pervasive fear, which is probably a function of change, that he means contemporaneous Western civilization, which is presumably assailed on all sides by existential threats. We can imagine the existential threats that Kolakowski might have cited in the mid-twentieth century, like nuclear war, pollution, and population, and we can equally well imagine the existential threats that are cited today when similar concerns for the future of civilization are voiced. Kolakowski also doesn’t tell us how the scientism of logical empiricism is supposed to act as a defense of this threatened civilization, but again we can infer from the context that this rationalistic civilization in which science has come to play such an outsized role in comparison to earlier civilizations requires a scientific defense of its scientific conceptual framework.
I wish Kolakowski had made all of this explicit, and it’s entirely possible that someone who knows the whole of Kolakowski’s work, which I don’t, could provide the references, but there’s enough in this book to see that what Kolakowski was getting at was the kind of philosophy of history that Husserl advanced in his last years, and which I discussed in my episode on Husserl. Husserl saw European civilization threatened by irrationalism, and argued that it was the rationalistic tradition of Western thought that was distinctive, and was, in his time, distinctively threatened. I said earlier that Kolakowski found a pursuit of an epistemic absolute in both Husserl and the logical empiricists, and we could, I think, reasonably describe Husserl’s philosophy of history as a scientistic defense of a threatened civilization no less than the logical empiricists, and Husserl did this quite explicitly as compared to the logical empiricists, in whom the theme is only implicit. Kolakowski finds both of these efforts, those of phenomenology and positivism alike, to have failed, but he believed that the quest itself remains worthwhile.
We can debate the relative merit of pursuing an unattainable epistemic ideal, and here I don’t necessarily disagree with Kolakowski, but in at least one respect, Kołakowski turned out to be dead wrong. Near the end of The Alienation of Reason he wrote:
“…we are today in a better position than ever before, thanks to more exact definitions of the scientific attitude and the scientific admissibility of assertions, to counteract the ideological misuse of science. In other words, ability to give a relatively good definition of the boundaries of scientific validity-an ability developed largely thanks to the positivists-is of great importance when we must criticize the claims of doctrinaires who invoke the authority of science in support of their slogans.” (The Alienation of Reason, pp. 199–200)
Subsequent history has shown us that the ideological misuse of science has only grown since Kolakowski wrote this, and it threatens to get worse. It’s not difficult to understand why this is the case. The growth of the status of science means that non-scientific claims in pursuit of the kind of status that science enjoys will seek to attach themselves to science so as to bask in the reflected glow of science. For philosophers, science is about the pursuit of knowledge. For the vulgar, science is a form of legitimation. Individuals or movements seeking legitimacy consequently will be drawn to science as a source of legitimation. The pursuit of legitimation through science will lead to always more elaborate efforts to imitate the appearance of science in order to benefit from the apparent legitimation this provides.
Of course, one of the appeals that Marxism was precisely this: its claim to being a scientific philosophy. That is to say, science was seen as a source of legitimation for Marxists who believed Marx’s work to be scientific. Kolakowski, though far from being an orthodox Marxist, is still responding to this Siren song of the scientificity of the tradition:
“When one attains an unshakable and absolute certainty that heaven is just around the corner… then no wonder that one messianic hope becomes the unique governor of life, the sole source of moral precepts and the only measure of virtue… This apocalyptic philosophy of history, which Joachim da Fiore and Thomas Münzer expounded, found its way in a certain form into the communist movement. Although in the latter it was supported by honest and fertile scientific analysis, in practice it acted upon the mass movement as a messianic vision.”
This is from Kolakowski’s “History and Responsibility,” a four-part essay, originally published as a series of articles in 1957, and which was included in the volume Marxism and Beyond: On Historical Understanding and Individual Responsibility, originally published in English in 1969. In this essay, after invoking the dispute between realism and utopianism, Kołakowski explicitly formulated six assumptions that he calls “anti-realist.” No, this isn’t the anti-realism of contemporary analytical philosophers, but an anti-realism conceived to redeem whatever remains defensible within utopianism, and therefore opposed to a presumptive realism. Some of these are formulated as complete sentences and some are single words:
FIRST ASSUMPTION: ethical individualism. Only human beings and their deeds are subject to moral judgement.
SECOND ASSUMPTION: determinism.
Here he gives only a single word, but he elaborates on this: “Opinions about good and evil and about the morality of people’s behaviour are determined by the way an individual participates in society.”
THIRD ASSUMPTION: the humanistic interpretation of values.
FOURTH ASSUMPTION: the historical interpretation of value. Duty is a form of existence.
FIFTH ASSUMPTION: the negation of the pseudo-realistic criticism of moralist utopias.
SIXTH ASSUMPTION: the possibility of ethical judgement of political choices. The fundamental political choices we make are subject to moral judgement.
Each of these assumptions are developed and elaborated over several pages, and they are interspersed with comments on the philosophy of history, such as this:
“A philosophy of history worthy of respect describes only what has already in some manner come into existence — that is, only the past, not the future creations of the historical process. Therefore, those who attempt to organize their own involvement in predicted processes according to what the philosophy of history suggests are like tourists who scribble their names on the walls of dead cities. Everyone can if he wishes interpret himself historically and unearth the determining factors that made him what he is — his past — but he cannot do the same for the self he has not yet become.”
As the author of “History and Responsibility,” Kolakowski was still a convinced socialist, and even, we might say, a utopian socialist, but he seemed to understand the threat to free inquiry that ideology represents to science:
“First of all, any political restriction on the subject matter of scientific research is damaging.
“Second, it is equally harmful, in a field that is subject to scientific research, to announce that certain truths are ‘politically correct’ and to demand that they be disseminated without regard to scientific discussion.
“Third, to lay down certain directions for research in scientific circles… is dangerous in humanistic studies because it often conceals a demand that they supply arguments for views accepted beforehand as being correct.
“Fourth, it is both dangerous and irresponsible to establish a sphere of untouchable truths that are excluded from discussion.”
Those were Kolakowski’s concerns in Poland in the 1960s; they are now, or ought to be, everyone’s concerns throughout the Western world today. Statements like this were enough to put Kołakowski on the wrong side most Marxists. As a Marxist apostate, Kołakowski drew the wrath of prominent Marxists in the West, which resulted in his exchange with the English historian E. P. Thompson. E. P. Thompson was a prototypical Marxist academic. He was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and he founded the Communist Party Historians Group. Thompson, together with Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Rodney Hilton, and Dona Torr, launched the journal Past and Present.
I’ve discussed his colleague Christopher Hill in two episodes, and tried to give a sense of Hill’s longing for a counter-factual communist utopia in early modern England, and I did this to try to give a sense of how far gone some of these Marxist historians are. Thompson withdrew from the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1956, after the Hungarian Uprising, but he continued his historical work in a Marxist vein, writing about labor history and social history. His most famous book is The Making of the English Working Class. The Preface starts out in an explicitly Marxist vein by discussing class and class consciousness in England, but near the end of this Preface Thompson has a moment in which he transcends his tiresome Marxism and delivers himself of this oft-quoted passage:
“I am seeking to rescue the poor stockinger, the Luddite cropper, the ‘obsolete’ hand-loom weaver, the ‘utopian’ artisan, and even the deluded follower of Joanna Southcott, from the enormous condescension of posterity. Their crafts and traditions may have been dying. Their hostility to the new industrialism may have been backward-looking. Their communitarian ideals may have been fantasies. Their insurrectionary conspiracies may have been foolhardy. But they lived through these times of acute social disturbance, and we did not. Their aspirations were valid in terms of their own experience; and, if they were casualties of history, they remain, condemned in their own lives, as casualties.”
The idea of aspirations being valid in terms of their own experience, even if they are not valid in terms of our experience, since we inhabit a very different social and economic milieu, is a formulation of historicism that deserves more attention. I don’t know of anyone who has tried to further develop this. So Thompson had his better moments, but his exchange with Kołakowski was not one of them, though the exchange remains well worth reading, as it foreshadows much that was to come in the culture wars.
Kołakowski noted that Raymond Williams called Thompson’s one hundred page “Open Letter to Leszek Kołakowski” of 1973, “one of the best pieces of Left writings in the last decade.” And, truly enough, it’s written in an engaging, conversational style that makes it sound like a real letter. Kołakowski responded in 1974 with “My Correct Views on Everything.” I will quote only a short passage in which he summarizes his objections to Thompson’s method in the open letter:
“I found it regrettable to see in your Letter so many Leftist clichés which survive in speech and print owing to three devices: first, the refusal to analyse words — and the use of verbal hybrids purposely designed to confound the issues; second, the use of moral or sentimental standards in some cases and of political and historical standards in other similar cases; third, the refusal to accept historical facts as they are.”
The exchange between Thompson and Kołakowski shows how almost nothing has been learned in the past fifty years, since academic Marxists like Thompson continue to pursue the same methods to this day. I should note that there’s no intrinsic reason that social history must be Marxist, and in many historians it is not. I my episode on Christopher Hill I quoted from Peter Laslett’s The World We Have Lost: England Before the Industrial Age, which could be taken as an example of non-Marxist social history, but the fact remains that a great deal of social history follows in the tradition of E. P. Thompson and Christopher Hill, where it is inspired by a Marxist perspective. That is to say, there is a dominant philosophy of history in social history, and that is Marx’s philosophy of history, which means that other philosophies of history are implicitly excluded.
That was something of a digression on social history, but now I want to return to Kolakowski, who, despite being purged from the Polish communist party, losing his professorship in Warsaw, and being attacked by Marxists from Western Europe, continued to identify as a communist.
In “History and Responsibility,” from which I quoted earlier, Kolakowski wrote:
“…regardless of what philosophy of history we may wish to accept, we will be rightly judged for everything subject to moral appraisal that we do in its name. And it is not true that our philosophy of history decides our main choices in life. They are determined by our moral sense. We are not communists because we recognized communism to be a historical necessity. We are communists because we stand on the side of the oppressed against their oppressors, on the side of wretches against their masters, on the side of the persecuted against their persecutors.”
Given the anti-realist assumptions I quoted earlier, Kolakowski seems to believe in a spiritualized form of Marxism, in which individual moral responsibility plays a central role. His moral concern is central, and he identifies his communism as following from his moral concerns. Despite professions such as this of his explicit identification as a communist, Kołakowski’s status as an internal critic of Marxism led him to become persona non grata in Poland. In 1966 he was dismissed from the Polish Communist Party, and in 1968 he was purged from Warsaw University and prevented from taking another academic post in Poland, so he became a visiting professor at McGill University.
Forced out of Poland, Kolakowski seems to have drifted away from Marxism. More than 30 years later, in his speech “What the Past is For,” given at the Coolidge Auditorium on 05 November 2003, his conception of history begins to sound more like Raymond Aron, who called history tyrannical and aimless, and Karl Löwith after Löwith felt that he had disposed with traditional philosophy of history, and found himself something at loose ends as a result. For Löwith, philosophy of history was at loose ends because traditional eschatology could no longer be taken seriously as the source of secularized conceptions of progress. For Kolakowski, philosophy of history was at loose ends because the eschatology of a spiritualized Marxism no long held the appeal it had once held for him. History seems to have become largely pointless:
“It is indeed arguable that we cannot use our historical knowledge to help us in our present work. It may be true that whatever people know about the military exploits of Alexander the Great or Hannibal would not be of much use in improving the skills of today’s generals, and that knowledge of the political intrigues at the French royal court in the 17th century would not be of much help to a contemporary politician.”
While this is putting the matter rather bluntly, this isn’t a new idea for Kolakowski. In his book on positivism he emphasized that the pursuit of an epistemic absolute by the logical empiricists had no utility at all in terms of a science that bears upon technology and so influences the ordinary business of life. Recall that this pursuit of an epistemic absolute in positivism and phenomenology was for Kolakowski a kind of eschatological project. Kokakowski has now come to the point that not only the ideal epistemological absolute of logical positivism bakes no bread, but even the mere knowledge of history, not necessarily an ideal attainment of knowledge, is of little or no use. This is still, in a sense, the technological argument that Kolokowski made decades earlier, but now generalized to the point that historical knowledge of ancient strategy or politics provides no insights for contemporary generals or politicians. Kolakowski continued:
“However, the limited technical support to be gained from an acquaintance with historical events is not a good reason for concluding that historical knowledge is irrelevant to our life. We are the cultural, though not necessarily physical, heirs of Alexander the Great, Hannibal and French monarchs; and to say that their lives, their deeds and misdeeds, do not matter to our lives would be almost as silly as saying that it would not matter to me if I were suddenly to erase from my memory my own past personal life, just because — obviously — I live in the present, not in the past. The history of past generations is our history, and we need to know it in order to be aware of our identity; in the same sense in which my own memory builds my personal identity, makes me a human subject.”
Kołakowski believes that acquaintance with historical events is valuable in spite of the lack of utility of this acquaintance. Rather, acquaintance with history is useful not because it is applicable, but because it is a source of identity. History is the social equivalent of memory, and as memory makes it possible for us to have a personal identity, history makes it possible for us to have a social and cultural identity. Although history is a source of identity, it isn’t or shouldn’t be a myth:
“…although the legacy of myth is certainly an important and fertile source in human culture, we must defend and support traditional research methods, elaborated over centuries, to establish the factual course of history and separate it from fantasies, however nourishing those fantasies might be. The doctrine that there are no facts, only interpretations, should be rejected as obscurantist.”
The idea that there are no facts, only interpretations, is due in its explicit form to Nietzsche, so Kolakowski is rejecting Nietzsche’s position as obscurantist. And he continues:
“…we must preserve our traditional belief that the history of mankind, the history of things that really happened, woven of innumerable unique accidents, is the history of each of us, human subjects; whereas the belief in historical laws is a figment of the imagination.”
Here we have an echo of Popper and the many philosophers, including philosophers of history, who have rejected the very idea that there could be laws of history. So, for Kolakowski, history is about facts and not about mythology, but at the same time these facts are not connected by any laws. History consists of innumerable accidents, making it little more than random. Nevertheless, Kolakowski sees value in the accidents of history:
“Historical knowledge is crucial to each of us: to schoolchildren and students, to young and old. We must absorb history as our own, with all its horrors and monstrosities, as well as its beauty and splendor, its cruelties and persecutions as well as all the magnificent works of the human mind and hand; we must do this if we are to know our proper place in the universe, to know who we are and how we should act.”
Knowing our proper place in the universe sounds to me like a Copernican theme, but our place in the universe is no random accident of nature. Our place in nature is the kind of place where beings like us can evolve. This can be generalized and extended to human history as well. Our civilization or our cultural region is a function of the kind of society that can evolve in the places where they have in fact evolved. Before industrialization, the foods you ate where those that could be cultivated locally, and the foods that could be grown locally shaped the culture of those who cultivated these foods. These things aren’t random.
We might not be able to give a very satisfactory account of the laws that connect the apparently unique accidents that cumulatively constitute history, but that’s no reason to give up on the attempt to understand. But by now I’m starting to see how a whole generation of philosophers, if not an entire century of philosophers, first disappointed by Hegel, and then by Marx, gave up on any attempt to grasp history as being in any sense intelligible. Since they were witnesses to the catastrophe of the twentieth century, I can’t blame them, but we don’t need to be bound by the limitations of the disappointment of a previous generation.
